Marvin Carlson

Marvin Carlson has translated an exciting collection of Jean-François Ducis radical reworkings of William Shakespeare's most famous tragedies, penned on the eve of the French Revolution. Following the rules of French neoclassicism, the result is a quartet of almost totally transformed works that serve to illustrate the antithetical dramatic approaches of Shakespeare's England and Racine's France. Plays included are Hamlet, Romeo and Juliette, King Lear, and Othello. 

During the late twentieth century, no country in the world produced as many major theatre directors nor esteemed them as highly as did Germany. Offering the most extensive and informative survey of contemporary German theatre available in English, Theatre Is More Beautiful than War covers three generations of ten of the country's leading stage directors, including Andrea Breth, Frank Castorf, Christoph Marthaler, Thomas Ostermeier, Claus Peymann, Stefan Pucher, Peter Stein, Michael Thalheimer, Anna Viebrock, and Peter Zadek, each of whom helped shape the twentieth-century German stage. Noted theatre historian Marvin Carlson draws on his years of regular visits to the Theatertreffen in Berlin and his observations of a variety of German theatrical productions to offer a provocative, well-illustrated study of the most productive and innovative theatre tradition in Europe. 

The Greek myth of Oedipus has been the Greek myth most developed by leading Arab dramatists, who have found in it grounding for political commentary, philosophic and theological meditation, and cultural satire. The four treatments in this book are by leading dramatists of the modern Arabic theatre-from Egypt, Tawfiq al-Hakim, Ali Salim, and Ali Ahmed Bakathir; and from Syria, Walid Ikhlasi. The settings range in time from ancient Greek Thebes and ancient Egyptian Thebes to a contemporary computer laboratory, where a super computer replaces the Delphic oracle as the source of the fatal prophesy. 

The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center has published The Heirs of Molière, translated and edited by Marvin Carlson. This volume contains four representative French comedies of the period from the death of Molière to the French Revolution: The Absent-Minded Lover by Jean-Francois Regnard, The Conceited Count by Philippe Nicault Destouches, The Fashionable Prejudice by Pierre Nivelle de la Chausse, and The Friend of the Laws by Jean-Louis Laya. Translated in a poetic form that seeks to capture the wit and spirit of the originals, these plays suggest something of the range of the Molière inheritance, from comedy of character, to the popular sentimental comedy of the 18th century, to comedy that employs Molière's tradition for more contemporary political ends-showing changing ideas about class, gender, and society in a turbulent century.

Though the reputation of French playwright Rene-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt (1773-1844) has waned since his heyday in the years following the French Revolution, the past 20 years have brought about a resurgence of interest in the father of melodrama," author of 120 plays. This volume contains four of his most important melodramas: The Ruins of Babylon or Jafar and Zaida, The Dog of Montatgis or The Forest of Bondy, Christopher Columbus or The Discovery of the New World, and Alice or The Scottish Gravediggers, as well as Charles Nodier's "Introduction" to the 1843 Collected Edition of Pixérécourt's plays and the two theoretical essays by the playwright, "Melodrama," and "Final Reflections on Melodrama." Daniel Gerould is Lucille Lortel Distinguished Professor of Theatre and Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center.